Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris

4. Reverse Exoticism & Masculinity: The Cultural Politics of Race Relations

111 ReveRse exotiCisM & MasCulinity The Cultural Politics of Race Relations Nightclub. Montparnasse. It’s filthy rich. There the cream of society and the swells meet up. Orchestra nègre. Mewing of the saxophones . . . Women “of the world” and their companions “out on the town.” One of these women, little, dry like an unemployed man’s bread, simpers: “Aren’t they sweet, those Noirs,” like she might say, “Isn’t he cute, that little dog.” Oh yes! You only know us as the nègre who laughs, the entertainer for men and women of leisure! But behind our radiant lips, there are teeth. Teeth that gnash at times! —“de mon coin,” Le Cri des Nègres In November 1932 the communist cell of the newly formed Union des Travailleurs Nègres (utn) met and discussed how to sell the organization to black men in Paris. The politics of race and antiimperialism had created a core, political black colony, but there was an entire sociocultural dimension to colonial Paris that still needed to be affected. Hence, one member argued that above all they should not “immediately impose communist politics upon members. They should augment their membership by attracting indigènes with fêtes and lectures.”1 The utn could attract workers as they exited their factories , in the cafés they frequented, and by inviting them to parties. Perhaps unbeknownst to these black men, Ho Chi Minh (known to the French at the time as Nguyên-Aï-Quôc) employed a similar technique , stopping Asians on the streets of Paris and thereby using racial visibility to his political advantage.2 4 112 Reverse Exoticism and Masculinity Henriette Carlier, the secretary of the French Communist Party’s colonial section, tried to lead meetings such as this one with an iron fist. She demanded that communist utn members of her black colonial section attend classes on propaganda and insisted that all correspondence from Africa be divulged to the Communist Party.3 A German woman whose real name was Eva Neumann, Carlier was sent to France in the 1920s by the Comintern. She married a French communist , Aimé Carlier, so as to avoid problems with the French police. As a white woman amongst black men who had very little room for any women within their organizations, her influence may have been tenuous, but she chose to ignore this fact. In June 1933, during another meeting of the communist cell, the hospital worker Pierre KodoKossoul pursued the theme of cultural politics by reasoning that the utn consisted of several factions, some of which were not interested in the communist doctrine, and that encounters with apolitical members needed to be handled with care. Carlier would have none of such reasoning and preferred to bulldoze Kodo-Kossoul, explaining that communists simply could not accept sugarcoating political objectives.4 Black men, she stated firmly, would only receive independence if they obeyed the orders and directives of the French Communist Party’s colonial section. Carlier’s audience, comprised of African and Caribbean men, listened . However, these men had already discovered that their capacity for independent thought and action depended in part upon preserving certain intellectual, social, political, and cultural spaces for themselves while in France. This they did in part by using masculinity and race to their advantage. So in the end they ignored her and responded, amongst other things, that their newspaper Le Cri des Nègres had to remain autonomous lest it stop “reflecting the ideas emanating from the nègre milieu.”5 The black colony was sculpted from the elements of racial and political solidarity, but Paris was still dominated in their eyes by white men. In consequence, strategies for sociocultural independence could not follow straightforward political lines, in particular with respect to the phenomenon of negrophilia. Neither Agent Joé nor the antiimperialists were immune from the vogue nègre so well embodied by Josephine Baker. They understood that blackness not only made them Reverse Exoticism and Masculinity 113 more visible on the streets of Paris, but also shaped their own milieus. How did black men respond to their categorization as exotic others when faced with a vogue nègre that threatened to leave them voiceless ? How did they reinforce their control not just over the political milieu they had forged in part through racial bonds, but also within the broader cultural sphere of the capital? Two strategies helped them to navigate this elusive...